An OWASP webinar is easy to dismiss as another calendar invite competing with actual work, but the format has quietly become one of the better free ways for an application security team to stay current — chapter talks and project webinars are where new attack techniques and tooling get discussed months before they show up in vendor blog posts. The trick is knowing which formats are worth the hour and which are recycled slide decks.
What kinds of OWASP webinars actually exist?
OWASP's training output splits roughly into three buckets. Local chapter meetings (most major cities have one) run monthly or quarterly talks from practitioners, often recorded and posted publicly, covering everything from a fresh bug bounty writeup to a walkthrough of a new OWASP project. Global project webinars, run by maintainers of things like the OWASP Top 10, ASVS, or SAMM, tend to be more structured and cover how the standard itself is evolving. Then there are the OWASP Global AppSec conference talks, many of which are livestreamed or webinar-adjacent and later posted to OWASP's YouTube channel in full. Each format serves a different purpose: chapter talks for practitioner-level war stories, project webinars for understanding the standards teams are already building policy around, and conference talks for the broadest and most current material.
Which ones are actually worth blocking time for?
The project webinars tend to have the best return on an hour of a security engineer's time, because they explain the reasoning behind changes to standards a team is probably already using — an OWASP Top 10 update webinar, for instance, walks through why a category moved or merged, which is exactly the context missing from just reading the updated list. Chapter meetings are hit or miss depending on the speaker, but they're free, usually thirty to forty-five minutes, and a good filter is whether the meetup page lists a specific tool or vulnerability class in the talk title rather than a generic "intro to appsec" framing — specificity tends to correlate with a practitioner sharing something they actually learned recently, not a recycled overview deck.
How do these compare to paid training?
An OWASP webinar won't replace a structured, hands-on training program — most are lecture-format, with no lab environment or graded exercises — but they're a genuinely useful supplement for staying current between formal training cycles, and they cost nothing. A reasonable split for a team building a training calendar: paid, structured courses (or an internal academy program) for onboarding new engineers and building foundational skills, and OWASP webinars and chapter talks as ongoing continuing education once the basics are covered. Treating free webinars as a replacement for structured training usually leaves gaps, because the format optimizes for breadth and topical relevance, not systematic skill-building.
What other free OWASP resources round this out?
The Top 10, the Application Security Verification Standard (ASVS), the Software Assurance Maturity Model (SAMM), and the Cheat Sheet Series are the four resources most teams should have bookmarked regardless of whether they attend a single webinar. The Cheat Sheet Series in particular is underused — it gives specific, actionable guidance (how to validate input for a given vulnerability class, how to configure a specific header) rather than the higher-level framing of the Top 10, and it's maintained by practitioners who update it as new bypass techniques emerge. Pairing that reference material with a habit of watching a project webinar or two a quarter keeps a team's mental model current without requiring a training budget line item.
How should a security team actually build this into a routine?
Pick one recurring source (a local chapter's mailing list, or OWASP's project calendar) and put the relevant sessions on the team calendar as optional but recommended, rather than leaving it to individual initiative — attendance drops fast without a light nudge. Recording a short internal summary after any session someone attends turns one person's hour into shared team knowledge instead of a one-off, and posting that summary to an internal blog or wiki gives the rest of the org a way to catch up asynchronously. Teams already running structured internal training can slot OWASP webinars in as the "what's new" segment of a quarterly review, which keeps the content current without displacing core curriculum. None of this requires new tooling or budget — it's a scheduling habit more than a technology decision.
FAQ
Are OWASP webinars free to attend?
Yes, virtually all OWASP chapter meetings and project webinars are free and open to anyone, though some require a quick registration through Meetup or a similar platform to get the calendar invite and recording link.
Where can I find recordings if I miss a live session?
OWASP's YouTube channel hosts recordings from most Global AppSec conferences and many chapter and project webinars. Individual chapter Meetup pages also often link to recordings of past sessions.
Is an OWASP webinar useful for developers, not just security engineers?
Yes, particularly chapter talks that walk through a specific vulnerability class with code examples — they translate well to developers who want to understand a vulnerability type without wading through a formal standard document first.
How does this fit with vendor-run security training?
They're complementary rather than competing. OWASP content is vendor-neutral and standards-focused; vendor training (including material in a platform's own academy) tends to be more hands-on and tool-specific. A well-rounded program uses both.